Photos by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

Lauren Brinkley (left) and Mary Dean (right) give Doretha Lipford an injection of lidocaine before working on her teeth during Mission of Mercy's dental clinic. The nonprofit event provides free dental care to uninsured people in the area.

Jonathan Pender (left), Kim Brown (back middle) and Travis Barham (foreground) work on James Glass. Volunteers with Mission of Mercy hope to treat about 1,300 patients over two days.

Some 81 dentists, dental assistants and dental hygienists have volunteered their services over two days at the Roanoke Civic Center.

Anyone with doubts about the need for dental care for the uninsured should have dropped by the Roanoke Civic Center on Thursday night.

Doretha Lipford, 57, showed up about midnight to wait for the Mission of Mercy free dental clinic to open Friday morning.

She wasn't the first one.

By 1 a.m. Friday, adults seeking dental work began to form a line. By 6 a.m., it stretched from a side door of the coliseum out the parking lot and down Williamson Road.

The clinic, Lipford said, is one of the few options for her and other uninsured adults in the area.

Lipford stood in line for five hours to see a dentist. She went to the clinic last year, but was one of many who was turned away.

Neither she nor her daughter, Stephanie Lipford, who waited with her, can recall the last time Doretha visited a dentist, save for some oral surgery she had in February.

"I had beautiful teeth," Doretha Lipford said as she pulled down her lower lip and showed nothing but gums. Black spots with green outlines were present where her teeth once were.

"Now, I don't have one good tooth," she said as she covered her mouth.

As Lipford's teeth began to rot, her self-esteem also suffered, she said. She could sense people judging her and began to cover her mouth whenever she spoke.

Dr. Terry Dickerson, executive director of the Virginia Dental Association and creator of Mission of Mercy, said he aspired to deliver hope to patients like Lipford who have few options.

"Some people have been beaten down so much in their lives that they've become cynical," he said. Some patients are in disbelief when they hear all services at the clinic are free.

"It's not so much a poverty of finances," Dickerson said of the patients, "it's a poverty of hope."

Dickerson, a retired dentist from Texas and the current executive director of the Virginia Dental Association, launched the first MOM project in 2000 at Wise. He realized the growing need for dental services in the United States while traveling abroad.

"When you're flying out to other countries, you fly over land with people who need the same care," he said.

The Virginia Dental Association said 40 percent of Virginia residents, or close to 2 million people, had no access to dental care in 2005 because they are uninsured, lacked sufficient insurance for their needs or were unemployed.

This weekend's clinic is one of five Mission of Mercy puts on annually and one of 36 clinics held in Virginia since 2000, Dickerson said.

He stood in a large room of the Roanoke Civic Center where 81 dentists, dental assistants and dental hygienists were there as volunteers. In all, more than 900 volunteers would work over the weekend to help an estimated 1,300 patients, he said.

By 11:30 a.m. Friday, Dickerson said the clinic had registered 800 people and treated nearly 400. Lipford had sat for treatment only a few minutes earlier.

Nurses checked her blood pressure after she registered early. Then she waited among a sea of people in front of a curtain with a sign that read "oral surgery." She said she was told she needed eight teeth pulled.

Another mother there was Debra Flinchum, 47, of Vinton, who waited while her daughter was in oral surgery.

Flinchum sat by herself as she worried for her 24-year-old daughter, who preregistered for the event at the Bradley Free Clinic. Flinchum has dental insurance but her daughter does not.

"You can't afford it," Flinchum said. "Families starting out today, I don't know how they make it."

She said she is frustrated and angry because she and her daughter work, yet her daughter is unable to afford dental insurance.

"This infuriates me," she said. "If you're a hardworking American citizen, you can't get diddly."

Flinchum said it has been 15 to 20 years since her daughter had seen a dentist. Her daughter was insured when she was younger, but Flinchum said even then insurance companies would leave her with large bills she couldn't afford.

Now her daughter has rotten teeth.

Flinchum said dentists estimated the costs to pull her teeth would be $4,000, including anesthesia. It doesn't include the cost of dentures, which her daughter intends to obtain in Bedford at a later date.

"Although these are hardworking people, they don't have access to mental care, dental care, medical care," Dickerson said. "You name it, they don't have it."

Lipford said she faced large bills as well. She was turned away at the 2007 clinic and had to visit a local dentist for oral surgery.

The bill was more than $3,000 and she said she had to pay up front. Only with the help of her church and family was she able to afford the bill, she said.

She sat in the chair and looked off to a corner of the room. Drills buzzed around her and drowned out the voices from waiting patients to a muffle.

Lipford sat with her hands crossed over her stomach as the dentists gave her three numbing shots of lidocaine. She didn't flinch.

The entire procedure took no longer than 15 minutes. With a mouthful of cotton Lipford and her daughter left and walked past hundreds of people still in line for treatment.

Dickerson said most likely they wouldn't be able to see all the people on Friday, but will take as many as possible this morning.

The need is "there all around you," Dickerson said. "But you don't see if you don't look."